Racks of equipment are commonly used in data routing (e.g., racks of routers, banks of modems), data storage (e.g., banks of storage devices), and data access (e.g., racks of servers). Typically, such racks of equipment or racks of devices are housed in a confined or bounded area or physical space. In confined areas (e.g., server rooms, data centers), the operation of the equipment can generate a significant amount of heat that could negatively affect the performance of the equipment. Thus, server rooms or their equivalent generally include cooling systems or environmental control systems. On top of the economic cost associated with running the equipment, the owner/operator of the equipment must also be concerned with the economic costs of running the environmental control systems.
Additionally, some server rooms house many (dozens or hundreds) of devices, which may make controlling the environment of the bounded space inefficient, given that the entire room may be controlled based on the operation of a particularly active hardware device or devices. Even in rooms that are separated into zones of environmental control, the reactive nature of the environmental control systems may not effectively increase or reduce cooling to the equipment based on actual performance of the individual devices. Thus, the environmental control systems may be inefficient, resulting in increased costs associated with running the environmental control systems.